Gerry LaFemina

The Text as Richard Serra Sculpture: On Reading the Prose
Poem

American philosopher John Dewey says, "Art is the experience,"
and by this he means not just the making of the art - i.e. that Pollock
at work on his paintings, dripping and dancing above the canvas is the
"art", the end product the "artwork" - in Dewey's
sensibility, however, the artwork is endowed with a certain potential
energy that is released when experienced: I engage the artwork, and I
have a reaction. It is the experience of the finished product that is
the art, and it is the experience with art and how it affects us that
makes art so important.

But let's take this one step further. The reason why innovations in art
have been met, at first, with scorn, fear, or rage is because often we
go to art with preconceived notions about what an artwork should
be - these hallmarks are subconscious, and represent a mixture of cultural
and personal experience, taste, and curiosity, among other factors. It
is here where our aesthetic exists - and how we react to a particular
artwork is as much a statement of our own expectations as it is about
the work itself; perhaps more so, hence the old adage, "I don't know
about art but know what I like". This statement sets up personal
expectations and taste against what art critics might say.

Let's take this to the music world. Nothing upsets the fans of a particular
band more to have that band release an album that sounds different. The
reason: it doesn't meet the listener's expectations for what an album
by this particular band should sound like. For the musicians,
the art of challenging one's self to write new material is matched by
the consumer's desire to have his/her expectations met. For many bands,
changing style can be a death knell. For others, though, their audience
grows with the band, expecting the eclectic or the avant garde. We hear
this best when we consider a band such as Sonic Youth, who has continually
grown and challenged their own sensibility without sacrificing their audience.
On the other hand, I remember when the L.A. punk band X released the album
See How We Are which was met by many in the band's core audience
with derision, though the title itself announces a change: it is not titled
See How We Were. Again, expectations and artistic vision come into conflict.

The difference, of course, is that when we go to an art museum we expect
to be challenged - especially if the words "modern" or "contemporary"
are in the names of the museum. When we buy a CD, we're participating
in consumerism, especially in stores that are selling to a broad commercial
audience. The musicians, though, can be committed to being both artists
and entertainers. The audience is one of art fans and consumers, and this
begs the question beyond the world of popular music: What happens when
we become consumers of art? People commission art works and have been
disappointed by the final products, leading to feuds between artist and
patron; closer to home, when we buy a book, for instance, does expectation
shape the relationship between reader and writer?

Young writers, especially poets, enter college with a preconceived notion
of what a poem or story is - often this idea is rooted in their lack of
experience. They want poems loaded with abstractions, with a rhyme scheme,
that conveys "emotion" in the most basic ways. Furthermore,
because of experiences they've had in literature classes, they expect
many poems to have a secret hidden meaning. These expectations are displayed
both in the cryptic poems the majority of them initially write, and in
their often negative responses to the poems we read. Whenever I ask an
introductory Creative Writing class or an Intro to Poetry class, What's
a poem? the most common response is: "It's the expression of
feelings." This is, of course, both true and an oversimplification.
Many times, I have students who are reluctant readers of contemporary
poems: their expectations are that the poems will be boring or they won't
"get" a particular poem, no matter how much assurance I give
them. The reason: they expect poems to be riddles of abstractions. Lastly,
because they haven't had much experience with contemporary poems, many
of the them have their doubts that the examples I give them are poems.

If they are reluctant readers of poems - unwilling to explicate, to push
themselves into the classroom discussion - they are willing readers of
prose poems. As long as I at first don't use the term "prose poem".
How differently they react to the quirky prose lyricism of the form. This
is often my access hatch to poetry for my students; they don't know they've
entered the realm of the poem until I use the term, well after our discussion
has been under way. Students, like most readers, have different expectations
of prose and of poetry; therefore, when they read a prose poem, they are
expecting not lyricism, image and the music of poetry. They experience
these things within the form of their experience - and we talk about them
in class. The students don't know they're talking poetry because the poetry
they're discussing is outside their expectations. As poet Michael Benedikt
notes,

The prose poem, which avoids by degree (but not by kind) various strictly
formal devices of rhymed verse, and which emphasizes an approach more
naturally consistent with the inward or 'associated' turnings of the
human psyche . . . seems an ideal vehicle for . . . sophisticated, psychologically
realistic, esthetic aspirations. (quoted in Stone)

And it's this natural consistency that enables the prose poem to inform
and entertain students.

It is this very duality of the prose poem that makes it great in the
classroom, and terrible in the greater literary world. As Charles Simic
pointed out,

The prose poem is . . . the monster child of two incompatible strategies,
the lyric and the narrative. On the one hand, there's the lyric's wish
to make time stop around an image, and on the other hand, one wants
to tell a little story. (quoted in Zawacki)

Like any monster child, there are some who love it, and some who want
to lock it away or send it into exile. There are many poets who disregard
the prose poem as form - seeing the name itself as a language game - you
can't have a poem in prose, they grumble; the very nature of
poems is lineation. Many of these complainers are writers of free verse
poems who complained vigorously when new formalists declared that free
verse wasn't real poetry - that poetry was rhymed and metered and used
traditional forms.

And again we scrape ourselves against expectations. In his discussion
of Joy Harjo's prose poems, critic Robert Johnson
mentions that "simply by seeing a poem a reader is tempted to accept
its form as indicative of meaning and to expect the poem to perform (and
be performed) as others of its general class." Just as many formalist
poems railed against free verse, many poets still bristle at the idea
of a prose poem because its shape belies how it functions. However, its
very form enables it to have great power as the experience of my students
shows. Furthermore, the form's momentum toward the literary mainstream,
implies that critical readers (if not critics themselves) understand and
sense the form's power. By knowing what to expect of the prose poem, one
may enjoy the form's unique qualities. And the expectation goes against
the expectation of the word poem itself.

I'm thinking, now, of Richard Serra's recent sculptures: Bellamy and
Sylvester. The works are huge "corridors" of curving metal -
sometimes the walls are concave, sometimes convex, and the viewer becomes
a participant as he/she can walk through the sculptures. Serra has said
that "the subject of the sculpture[s] is the viewer's experience
walking through and around it" (quoted in Tomkins
52). The same may be true of the best prose poems -
the subject is as much the surprise and duality the reader experiences
in the work as it is the "meaning" of the text itself. Serra's
sculptures change our relationship with sculpture - who hasn't wanted
to touch the work in a gallery, have a tactile experience of it. But our
experience always is that we aren't allowed. Serra, however, turns our
expectation of sculpture on its head, just as he has done in regards to
the steel his sculptures are made from. The swoops, curves and buoyancy
of Serra's work transforms its elemental material. Ditto, in the hands
of premier craftspersons, the prose poem transforms both the medium of
prose and the medium of poetry into something new; the sentences swoop,
curve and float in unexpected and unique ways that make Peter Johnson,
poet and editor of The Prose Poem: an International Journal,
say that he "must look at each [prose] poem as if it is
its own genre" (Johnson 16).

The history of the prose poem shows us that it was wrought, deliberately,
into this schism between elitist language of poetry and the more urbane
realm of prose. Baudelaire's prose poems were as much a political form,
a statement about the nature of the arts in nineteenth century France,
as they were a literary statement. They were outside of the experience
of the readers and thus truly revolutionary. What's amazing today, as
the short prose form proliferates into sudden fictions, flash fictions,
performance texts, short-shorts, micro-fictions, etc, is that the surprising
original hybrid, the prose poem, is both highly in vogue and still pushed
aside by many in the American poetic mainstream. Stephen Dunn subtitles
his 1998 collection Riffs & Reciprocities: prose pairs, not
poems. He refers to the pieces as paragraphs. Yet these pieces' mixture
of lyricism, imagism, meditation and narrative are all hallmarks of the
prose poem tradition.

While many refuse to embrace the prose poem in name, others engage the
prose poem with enthusiasm; Maurice Kilwein Guevara, author of two collections
of poetry before releasing Autobiography of So-and-so: Poems in Prose
in 2001, says about the prose poem: "The prose poem maintains a seemingly
traditional narrative approach, but it is sometimes ruptured by the irrational
or surreal which gives the piece an uhh which wouldn't happen
[if it weren't working in both poetic and prose traditions]" (private
correspondence with the author). It's this rupture of the irrational,
captured in the very term prose poem, that is the source of energy
in the prose poem. And it's this energy that is making the prose poem
a more mainstream form. Since Simic won the Pulitzer for The World
Doesn't End in 1990, books of prose poems have won major awards including
the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, and the Mammoth
Books Prize; the Marie Alexander Prize was established for collections
of prose poems first at New Rivers Press and now with White Pine Press;
a slew of mixed genre poetry and prose poetry books have been released
by diverse writers such as Mary Oliver, Campbell McGrath, and Sean Thomas
Dougherty; and a number of new anthologies of short-short prose pieces
have been recently published.

The dismay at the term prose poem which some in the literary
mainstream and many outside of it feel, is part of the power of the prose
poem itself - the duality, the seeming irrationality - of the term is
at the heart of the form's power. It exists in two worlds. It is of two
minds. And although this is true of the best of poems, the form of the
prose poem, it's traditional prose look, is camouflage for its subversive
nature. It subverts the world of the readers of both poetry and prose.
It subverts the rules of the rational world - the mainstream world - with
its seemingly familiar form that is invaded by the irrational, the surreal,
the magically real, the absurd, the imagistic, the truly symbolic. The
prose blocks are wrought like the steel sheets of a Serra sculpture so
the sentences twist and curve and cause us to have an experience through
which the world and how we understand it has been, if only momentarily,
transformed.

Gerry LaFemina's latest book is Graffiti Heart, winner of
the 2001 Anthony Piccione / MAMMOTH Books Prize in poetry. He's also author
of Zarathustra in Love, a collection of prose poems among others.
He serves on the Board of Directors of the Association of Writers and
Writing Programs (formerly the Associated Writing Programs). His affiliation
is with Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York.